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Crossmodal coupling of oculomotor control and spatial attention in vision and audition

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Abstract

Fixational eye movements occur involuntarily during visual fixation of stationary scenes. The fastest components of these miniature eye movements are microsaccades, which can be observed about once per second. Recent studies demonstrated that microsaccades are linked to covert shifts of visual attention. Here, we generalized this finding in two ways. First, we used peripheral cues, rather than the centrally presented cues of earlier studies. Second, we spatially cued attention in vision and audition to visual and auditory targets. An analysis of microsaccade responses revealed an equivalent impact of visual and auditory cues on microsaccade-rate signature (i.e. an initial inhibition followed by an overshoot and a final return to the pre-cue baseline rate). With visual cues or visual targets, microsaccades were briefly aligned with cue direction and then opposite to cue direction during the overshoot epoch, probably as a result of an inhibition of an automatic saccade to the peripheral cue. With left auditory cues and auditory targets microsaccades oriented in cue direction. We argue that microsaccades can be used to study crossmodal integration of sensory information and to map the time course of saccade preparation during covert shifts of visual and auditory attention.

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Notes

  1. Pilot data of experiment 1 based on a subset of participants were reported in a commentary on Tse et al. (2003). We showed that microsaccade orientations were in good agreement with contralateral shifts of covert attention observed in response to peripherally flashed stimuli.

  2. A Matlab implementation of the algorithm with a short sequence of experimental data can be downloaded at http://www.agnld.uni-potsdam.de/~ralf/micro/.

  3. Note that AV and VA must be primarily looked upon as control studies in the context of VV and AA rather than as experiments for the investigation of crossmodal effects. In our paradigm, the attentional shifts in the target modality induced by the spatial cues in their modality were not implicitly evoked, i.e. target modality was known in advance of target presentation. Therefore, attention shifts in AV and VA are not hard-wired crossmodally cued as for example Spence and Driver (1996, p1007) would say.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Jochen Laubrock, Hans Arne Trukenbrod, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript. This research was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grants KL-955/3 and KL-955/6).

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, PO Box 601553, 14415, Potsdam, Germany

    Martin Rolfs, Ralf Engbert & Reinhold Kliegl

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  1. Martin Rolfs
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  2. Ralf Engbert
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  3. Reinhold Kliegl
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Correspondence to Martin Rolfs.

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Rolfs, M., Engbert, R. & Kliegl, R. Crossmodal coupling of oculomotor control and spatial attention in vision and audition. Exp Brain Res 166, 427–439 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-2382-y

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